Stateless Democracy

In many ways, the academy’s approach reminded me of
the educational ideas advanced by the twentieth-century
American philosopher John Dewey. Like the Rojava instructors,
Dewey was critical of traditional approaches, in
which teachers transmit facts unidirectionally to passive
students. Instead, he regarded education as an interactive
process, in which students explore social issues through
critical give-and-take with their teachers.
Dewey would likely have approved the fact that the
academy, rather than requiring students to memorize,
teaches them to “claim,” or overcome, separateness: “We
emphasize that everyone is a subject.” Moreover, it instills
habits of lifelong learning: “Our goal is to give students the
ability to educate themselves,” beyond graduation. Dewey,
too, thought learning should address the whole person, not
the intellect alone; that it should highlight our common human
condition and should continue throughout life.
The academy seeks not to develop professionalism but
to cultivate the well-rounded person. “We believe humans
are organisms, they can’t be cut up into parts, separated
into sciences,” an instructor told us. “One can be a writer
or a poet and also be interested in economy, understand it,
because human beings are part of all life.”
For decades, the schools of the Ba’ath regime, with its
nationalistic focus, had aimed to create an authoritarian
mentality. The Mesopotamia Academy is intent on overcoming
this grim past by “helping create free individuals
and free thoughts.” Once again, I was reminded of Dewey,
who also rejected the notion that the purpose of education
is to create docile workers for hierarchical workplaces.
Rather, he thought, education should help students fulfill
the full range of their human potentiality.
The Mesopotamia Academy does not encourage professionalism;
least of all does it show students how to maximize
their economic self-interest. In the United States, far
too many top students nowadays head to Wall Street for
careers as investment bankers, but education in Rojava
is not about “building a career and getting rich.” Rather,
academy students are taught to “ask themselves how to
enrich society.”
John Dewey thought the ultimate purpose of education
was to create reflective beings who participate ethically as
citizens in the democratic community, and that education
should thus be a force for social reform. As if echoing this
thought, one of the instructors remarked to our delegation,
“When we do science of society, what we are trying to do is
struggle for social freedom.”
None of the Mesopotamia Academy teachers mentioned
Dewey, and I have no reason to think that they knew his
approach — surely they arrived at it independently. But the
similarity was nonetheless striking.
I was also struck by a further coincidence. In the midtwentieth
century, Dewey’s ideas influenced several experimental
schools in the US. Most notable was Goddard
College, located in central Vermont, which in the 1960s and
1970s was a trailblazer in Deweyite education. During most
of the 1970s, one of the teachers at Goddard College was anarchist
Murray Bookchin, who taught his ideas there under
the name of “social ecology.” Bookchin did not write much
specifically about education, but his writings on democracy
and ecology would go on, in translation, to influence Öcalan
and the concept of democratic confederalism, the overall
ideology to which Rojava is committed.
Yekîtiya Star Academy, Rimelan
The women’s academy — Yekîtiya Star Academy — in
Rimelan pushes the educational approach of the Mesopotamia
Academy further. Founded in 2012, its purpose
is to educate female revolutionary cadres, so naturally its
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